Authors: Gordon Ferris
I laughed out loud at the image. But then I thought about where next month’s rent was coming from. And I thought about being paid for spending more time in her lively company. Who could
pass up an offer like that? I should have; I was barely over the last woman in my life, real or imagined. I needed repair time.
“Eve, it’s a deal. If anything comes up, I’ll give you a call, OK? My rate is twenty pounds a week. Can your paper cover that?”
“Fifteen.”
“Eighteen plus expenses.”
She nodded and grinned and stretched out a hand. We shook. Like a regular business deal. She crammed her thatch under her beret again and skewered it to her head. I saw her to the door and
watched her spiral down the stairs. I would have whistled as I walked back to my desk but it would have echoed after her, and she would have read too much into it.
I thought about the warehouse prospect and wondered if I should have mentioned it. I decided to see how my meeting went this afternoon. Then I might call and let her in on it. And, if I was
honest, it wasn’t just about the money.
THREE
Tommy Chandler was short but wide. His barrel chest was constrained from exploding by taut red braces. He ran a warehouse in docklands that had largely escaped the bombs.
Having one of the few intact depots should have been making Tommy a lot of money. In theory he was – but before he could bank any of it, it was disappearing. Tommy had rats in his warehouse,
man-sized, and they were eating his goods. Tommy had called me a couple of days ago at his wits end. I’d agreed to go down and take a look.
It took three buses to get from my office near the Elephant across Tower Bridge and down Wapping High Street. I went upstairs not just to have a fag but to get a view crossing the bridge. It
does your heart good to see the cranes bobbing all along the river. I know the docks got a hammering, but give or take some missing teeth in the river frontage, plenty of warehouses were back in
business – one of them my prospective client’s. I got off in the Commercial Road and walked down the cobbles to Wapping High Street, glimpsing the river through bombsites as I went.
Tommy’s yard was bustling; a horse and cart were backing up to the warehouse doors, while a van roared and squeezed me against the big wood gates on its way out. I had no doubt Tommy was the
one shouting out orders. He took me inside.
“Why can’t the police stop it?”
Tommy snorted. His beefy hands pushed at his shirt sleeves in frustration. A permanent cigarette hung from his mouth and left a yellow trail up his short moustache.
“Fuckin’ coppers!” he wheezed. Tommy was a self-made man; he’d left behind none of the vocabulary of the docker.
“They come ’ere, and they ponce about and they fuckin’ throw their ’ands up in the air and say they can’t do nothin’. What are we paying these ponces for,
that’s what I want to bleedin’ know?”
Tommy was pacing up and down a tiny glass office tucked into a corner of the great wood and brick building. He looked as if he was warming up for a bare-knuckle fight. Though if his chest was as
bad as it sounded he wouldn’t make the first bell.
“What security measures have you taken, Mr Chandler?”
“It’s Tommy. Come on. I’ll show you.” He stormed out of his little office like a bull at a rodeo and we did a grand tour. He took me up ten flights of stairs to the top
level. Despite his girth and his sixty-a-day habit he seemed to be breathing easier than me. Which would disappoint old Les at my gym. I was trying to get back to my levels of fitness in my army
days by going to Les’s a couple of times a week. He was a welterweight contender before the war and now coached young kids from a big room above some shops in the Old Kent Road. Twenty
minutes with a skipping rope and five rounds in the ring was still leaving me weak as a kitten. But it was a start. Maybe I needed to increase my fags to Tommy’s level.
We walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling gaps and looked down on to the great worm of the river. It was a long way to the deck of the waiting ship that sat with belly open to the plundering
arms of the cranes.
Cargo boats were now returning in growing numbers from around Britain and from America and the Far East. Each of the warehouses tended to specialise. Across the river at Butler’s Wharf and
Jacob’s Island, sailing clippers had been landing tea and spices from the East India Company for the last hundred and fifty years. Now, squat iron hulks rode the oily swell and burped grey
smoke from their funnels. On either side of Tommy stood a coal warehouse and a scrap metal trader. Tommy took in silks from abroad and sent out cottons and lace from the north to every corner of
the British Empire, what was left of it.
I watched his great cranes swing and groan, and fumble deep into the metal holds like giant fishing rods. The bales were pulled in through double doors that studded the warehouse walls from
river level to where we stood, five storeys up. Groups of flat-capped men shouted and cursed below us, signing directions at the crane drivers like tic-tac men. They manhandled each haul through
the doors into big barrows, then pushed them off into the building’s entrails and stored them in dark corners. It reminded me a bit of the coal mine my dad worked in, but at least these men
could suck in fresh air.
I could have watched this ant heap for hours, but I was running to keep pace with Tommy. Wheezing all the way, he led me down to ground level. We scampered across the yard and emerged on Wapping
High Street through huge wooden gates. For a minute or two we watched horse-drawn carts and groaning lorries bounce along the cobbles, carrying loads around London and on up country on goods
trains.
“Them horses are on the way out, you know. Bleedin’ shame. Look at them beasties. Lovely. My dad had four. Great bleedin’ Clydesdales. Big as fucking warehouses
themselves.”
We turned our backs on the road and traced the route in and out, starting with the gates. They rose in solid slabs of wood twenty feet in the air and about the same in width. Tommy showed me the
courtyard side of the gates where spars of metal crisscrossed and reinforced the backs. He’d had huge new padlocks fitted. The keys were kept in a safe and only Tommy had the combination. Not
even his three senior foremen had access. He pointed them out to me: Sid, a runty bloke with a set of dentures nicked from a horse; Stevie, a taller version of Tommy himself; and Albert,
who’d left one of his arms behind at Dunkirk and used his hook to menace the dockers.
“An’ I’ve got a team of night watchmen that patrols the whole bleedin’ place every night of the week. And dogs loose in the yard. Alsatians that would rip your balls off
and ask questions after.”
“And still…?”
“An’ still stuff gets nicked! It fuckin’ vanishes like piss on a fire, it does. Nobody sees nothin’. Nobody hears nothin’. It’s a fuckin’ miracle.
Houdini couldn’t do no better.”
I began to have my own thoughts, but wanted to hear his. “So what do you reckon?”
“If’n I knew that
,
sonny Jim, I wouldn’t be bleedin’ asking your expert bleedin’ advice, would I?”
“You’ve had longer to think about this than me, Tommy. I’ve got some ideas but I’d like your insights.”
He studied me with his raging eyes, and lit another fag and jammed it in the corner of his mouth. Then he fingered his braces, stained from his fat thumbs. He pulled the elastic out and let them
slap against his chest. Maybe the pain calmed him down.
“Fair ’nough. Here’s how I sees it. It’s an inside job and my own men are robbing me blind. Must have spare keys. Maybe the locksmith’s in on the act. They just
walk out the bleedin’ front door. Nex’ thing they’re floggin’ it down the lane, as bold as you like. As though their old ma had found a bit of cloth in her attic an’
didn’t have no use for it.”
His face was going purple at the thought of it. I stopped him before he blew up like a Zeppelin.
“Tommy, I think you’re right. There must be inside help. Tell me, is there any pattern to this? Do they come on particular nights or weekends or what?”
“They come when I gets a new load in, a good load, silk, or somethin’ they can flog for the most bleedin’ money, that’s when!” He lit another fag from the end of
the current one.
“OK. When’s the next
good
load due?”
“Four days from now. Thursday morning the
Clever Girl
comes in from Holland. She’s out of Constantinople through the Med. She drops half the load in the Hague and the other
half here. Nice stuff. The best. The bastards will be queuing up to nick it!” He thumped the wooden gate so that it shuddered.
“Not this time, Tommy. Maybe not this time. If I can have a crack at it. Me and a few mates of mine will spend the night here.”
“I’ve tried that myself. Nothing. Not even a bleedin’ mouse.”
“Of course not. You’re not hard to spot, Tommy. They just wait for you to give up and then it’s back to business.”
He was nodding furiously and smoke was coming out of his mouth like the Royal Scot. “I knows, I knows. What you gonna do, then?”
“I don’t want you to tell anyone, not even your foreman. Not even your wife!”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Some of my mates were Special Services…”
Back at the office I phoned the landlord of the George and left a message for Midge, one of my part-time, as-and-when, don’t-tell-the-taxman employees who worked for beer
money and had no problem spending it. They’d been stretched in the Forces and found it hard to settle down to a proper job. Like me. Midge would get word out to the others. I needed three,
though I would have preferred twenty.
I thought for a long time about making the second call. The plan I had in mind was dangerous. No, not dangerous; risky. I know Midge and co would be up for it, but why should I complicate
matters by bringing a bint in on the act? A reporter at that? They would curse me black and blue. I decided to start with some small fry and see how she reacted. I picked up the phone and asked the
operator to connect me to the news desk of the
Daily Trumpet
.
“You’ll have to speak up, Danny!”
She sounded like she was at a Rangers match. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. Mama Mary.”
“A nun?”
“Not Mother,
Mama
Mary. A very different line of business.” And how.
“Where?”
“Soho.”
“So she runs a whorehouse?”
“She calls it her pleasure palace.”
“You’re selling me into slavery?”
“Mama Mary has her fingers on the pulse. If it’s illegal, she knows of it.”
“The
Trumpet
’s favourite kind of woman.”
We agreed a time and a date, and I
hung up, but my smile lasted a while longer.
FOUR
As I roused myself from sleep, I remembered I was seeing Eve today for the first of our jaunts. The notion raised mixed emotions: she was easy on the eye but hard on the brain;
the sort of feisty girl that attracts men like moths to a candle, often with the same tragic ending. A woman who can provoke thoughts of murder or suicide. Sometimes both. As I lay there gathering
my wits I ran a quick mental check to make sure she wasn’t part of an interesting dream. Nope. I’d phoned her office twice since our first meeting – once more than I needed to
– to confirm arrangements. She was real enough, unless she’d hired a secretary from the spirit world.
I was beginning to believe I was cured. I’d stopped imagining women now. No more ghosts to haunt my waking hours. Doc Thompson had given me the all clear provided I attended a monthly
clinic with one of his pals in Harley Street. It saved a long train ride to Wiltshire, but it cost two guineas a go. An arrangement which seemed all wrong: it was paid for by the Army Department,
but I still felt like the Doc and his ilk should be paying me for providing grist to their psychiatric mill. I was seeing Professor Haggarty at nine this morning and Eve this afternoon. I would
have cancelled the mad Prof, but he was an enthusiastic Irishman who had trouble hearing the word no.
I’m in a rut with my morning rituals. I sat on the edge of the bed and lit a fag and waited for the kick to get me going. It came in a brief buzz of nausea, followed by the first cough,
then the head cleared. I picked up my latest Penguin from the floor by my bed and placed it carefully on the end of a growing shelf of orange and green covers. In our house we’d never owned
books; we just borrowed from the big Victorian library. But now, at a tanner a go, I can’t get enough of the smart wee paperbacks.
I tossed my pyjamas on the bed and wandered to the sink to light the gas flame under the immerser. While the water was warming I switched on the wireless and watched the light gather behind the
dial and the sound of the Home Service break through. I like to listen to the seven o’clock news before switching to music.
I cleared the draining dishes and pot from my supper last night: mash, greens and two of the tiniest lamb chops I’d ever seen. Even the sheep were on rations. I propped my little mirror
against the draining board, put a new blade in the razor, and turned on the tap of the immerser. Then I rinsed my face with warm water, worked up some lather in my shave bowl and scraped my cheeks
till they glowed. I lit the gas ring, filled the kettle and put it on. By the time I’d scrubbed myself with the flannel and dried the pool on the floor, the first cuppa was imminent.
Warmth seeped in through the skylight window from the late spring sun. Birds were belting out mating calls. May is a great time to be in London, even a London tattered from five years of
pounding by Hermann. It was also a nice switch from this time last year. In ’45 I was hauled out of a Dakota at RAF Brize Norton on a stretcher and whisked off to have my head fixed. A year
ago they were taking bone splinters out of my brain and screwing in a piece of aluminium. They joked about it coming from a cannibalised Spitfire, said I’d have my own built-in war memorial.
As long as it wasn’t from a Messerschmitt.
I went back to the mirror and massaged a dab of Brylcreem into my hair, kneading the ridge under the skin. I combed the red tangle to careful order so that the scar was hidden, apart from the
end that ran down into my left eyebrow. Maybe I should try a kiss-curl.